If you’re like me at Christmas, you spare a good bit of no expense to provide nothing but second best the best for the guy whose name you picked out of a hat your loved ones. In that helpful spirit, here is how you get out-of-print songs that you don’t own off of the internet and onto your knock-off brand X mp3 player!

1. Download some cheese-eating audio editing software… like the one that rhymes with “Shmaw-dacity.”

2. Get a mini-to-mini audio cable (stereo.) It helps if you swiped a bunch of these from the place you used to work. (Sorry, I left that out.)

3. Connect the audio out from one laptop to the mic in of a second laptop. (Oh yeah, you need two PCs. Dang it!)

Fingers are flying here at LivelyExchange. My indentured elves are busy milling words to within 0.003 tolerance while they fantasize about my grisly demise, and ways to make it look like an accident. Let’s take a look at the lineup of recent or ongoing print, web and video projects clogging the pipes:

And finally, I produced ANOTHER rendition of the Veterans Day video. That’s volume six in the increasingly ill-named “Veterans Trilogy!” Anyway, I have to run…an elf fell into the 2500-ton press. That’s the third one this month, and they are a drag to clean. The rest of you, back to work!